Why the ‘Maker Movement’ is Popular in Schools

From kindergarten to second grade, students traditionally make things with playdough, legos and other objects. But somewhere along the way, the maker mindset has been lost in older grades, Libow Martinez said.

“It’s easy to blame the focus on tests, it’s easy to blame the focus on accountability and that sort of thing,” she explained. “But I think it’s something even more. I think we’ve kind of not been serious about keeping school viable for the modern world.”

And parents have been telling Libow Martinez that something needs to change. Their children play with legos for hours on end at home. But that creativity gets buried at school.

“School is killing my kid,'” she recalls them saying. “‘It’s killing their creativity, killing their intensity, killing their desire to put things together and be curious. Something’s gone terribly wrong when caring parents are saying school is killing their kid.'”